`CONVERSATIONS` WITH MILOSZ ARE SELDOM MORE THAN WORDS

Reviewed by Frances Padorr Brent, The editor of Formations and co- translator of ``Beyond the Limit: Poems by Irina RatushinskayaCHICAGO TRIBUNE

Conversations with Czeslaw Milosz

By Ewa Czarnecka and Aleksander Fiut

Translated by Richard Lourie

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 352 pages, $27.95

`Conversations with Czeslaw Milosz'' contains two interviews published separately in Polish but brought out now in English translation as a single book addressing the Nobel poet`s biography, his work and larger questions about reality, theology and form in art that have engaged his imagination throughout a long career.

The interviews cover a broad territory. As with others of his generation, Milosz has survived a ''picturesque'' life not of his choosing. Born in 1911 into the Polish-speaking gentry in Lithuania, he experienced in childhood the unraveling of the old European class structure. His early years were spent first in travel, while the family accompanied his father, an engineer in the tsar`s army, across Russia, settling afterwards in the city of Wilno; later he witnessed Soviet occupation of eastern Poland, Nazi occupation of Warsaw, then totalitarianism in the Polish People`s Republic, emigration, Paris, and Berkeley, Calif. The interviews touch on more than a score of books that Milosz has written and edited, an ambitious project, the summary of a man`s life and oeuvre.

These are not unguarded conversations and one doesn`t find in them revealing slips of the tongue. Throughout, one senses a tension between the desire to clarify, ''the desire not to appear other than I am,'' and the poet`s credo: '' . . . what is valued most is left untouched.'' As is proper with conversation, certain problems recirculate throughout the text and these often have to do with the formulation of images. The book begins with reminiscences of Lithuania and memories of his grandparents` house in Szetejnie: The walls of the servants` quarters blackened by flies, the shelves of brass pots in the manor house kitchen. It is difficult to reconstruct impressions: What is retrieved from memory is given shape by vantage point, literature and ideas picked up through the years. This principle causes disturbances as well in the image of one`s self. Milosz is clearly uncomfortable with the position of moral authority he holds in Poland and the United States. It is impossible to separate the layers, to peel back the individual from the mitigating experiences of history.

A large portion of the conversations reviews individual books and poems and, in these sections, Milosz discusses the contradictions inherent in his image as a poet. Many of the early poems have been categorized as civic-minded works of moral indignation. ''Campo dei Fiori,'' for instance, a poem written in 1943, describes citizens of Warsaw amusing themselves on Sunday, undisturbed by the ashes the wind has carried across from the burning ghetto. Milosz articulates his distaste at being identified solely by such work, which, of necessity, springs from rhetoric: ''Writing that kind of poetry always had a bad effect on me. . . . I prefer some of the poems from ''Three Winters'' or ''The World,'' because they contain affirmations and have a certain metaphysical background.''

This is an interesting, and I might say, European point of view, the desire to ground poetry in things universal, but Milosz has affected our English-speaking poets already. Indeed, this struggle for directness is of central importance for those engaged in making art in our time and the question of how to describe this universe without the aid of irony and clowning remains unanswered.

It is difficult, as well, to converse directly and, if the interviews fall short of this, they reflect a taboo Milosz has articulated many times before: ''A man when he talks should not use words that are dear to him . . . .''